Solar Powered Plant Mate Puts Your Garden's Vitals On Your iPhone

If you're a fretful gardener with a gadget geek streak, you might love this concept design by Tom Dooley, Mansour Ourasanah, and Mathieu Turpault. Using solar powered spikes distributed throughout your garden, you can get the vitals delivered to your iPhone, showing you everything from nutrition levels in soil to sun exposure and their impacts on your favorite plants. Techy gardening can be helpful, especially for those with a pale green thumb. But even the most experienced gardeners might not mind a little help. Perhaps if you're working hard to grow your own food crops and aren't sure what should go where in your garden, or don't know why your crops are struggling, this Plant Mate could be a help.

Yanko Design states, "Literally listed as a "solar powered gardener wannabee helper." It is a guide for any gardener on a sort of small garden (or potentially giant garden) project that needs a little bit more than eyeballing. It's a set of spikes you jab into the ground, each of them powered by the sun, each of them made to relay information to you about the moisture and nutrient levels of the soil, as well as sun exposure and temperatures the plants are receiving."

The information gets sent to your phone or computer so you can easily track what your garden needs. Curious, though, if you could just rig something - like hook up your existing solar powered garden lights to an easybloom or some such hack, rather than buying a new product.